Two well-known Silicon Valley Web executives have launched a venture capital firm to finance and advise early-stage technology companies, yet another sign of the growing appetite of investors to place bets on younger startups.

It took former Twitter executive Satya Patel, 38 years old, and longtime former Google and YouTube executive Hunter Walk, 39, just four months to raise a $35 million fund–largely from a university endowment, a foundation, and two other institutional investors.

Their firm, called Homebrew (an homage to a computer hobbyist group that formed in Silicon Valley in the 1970s), won’t just write checks. As former product executives, Patel and Walk say they plan to take an active role in their portfolio companies, helping to shape their products and organizations in what venture capitalists call the “seed” stage. Read More »

Starting a company is hard — and one of the most difficult parts of the process for entrepreneurs is raising money from investors.

A big part of being able to raise money is being able to get a meeting with an investor, but you also have to ace that meeting in order to get an investment.

Fred Wilson, managing partner at Union Square Ventures and one of New York’s high-profile investors, took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington to talk a little bit about that.

In the conversation, he went over some tips for entrepreneurs taking meetings with investors that will help them survive the meeting and walk out with a check.